


Damp

by Atrokiss



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, F/M, Family Issues, Fluff and Angst, Gay Male Character, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Internalized Homophobia, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Relationship(s), Self-Acceptance, Self-Denial, Substance Abuse, This is an original story, Trust Issues, i forget whats even in the first chapter ahahah its been too long!, i have no idea how to tag thisssssss, its gonna be a sad one sorry, please dont kill me ahah, spoilers whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-21 02:25:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11934375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atrokiss/pseuds/Atrokiss
Summary: "Just breathe," somebody tells you. Just breathe and you will see your way through this. But breathing gets so much harder when mold hangs from your cieling and threatens to shut your airways up tight. Mihael Vrhovec was never given a chance to breathe, because his father never let him. Enduring years that consisted of swollen purple eyes and broken hearts, he learns to close himself off and shut everybody out, to submerge himself under water until his heart stops beating and he's red in the face. But what happens when it all gets too much the bear? What if someday, someone comes along and tells him it's okay to breathe, but he's forgotten how? In this story of forgiveness and self preservation Mihael will just have to learn how to come up for air.





	Damp

**Author's Note:**

> This is an original story written by me! It is far from finished, but it's maybe the second or third draft. I just wanted to put the first chapter out there and see how it's received! I've been working in this for the better part of a year now and it's my pride and joy. I truly have poured every ounce of energy and dedication into the characters and the story line. It's near and dear to my heart and I'm terrified to let it out into this teeny part of the world! Im not too happy with the summary, because this story is so much more than that, but hopefully it's enough to get you here reading it! So here it is, the first chapter/ introduction of Damp! I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :)

PART i. From dawn to midday on the sea  


There are a few distinct memories Mihael has of his childhood; one of the most prominent was of the dampness that clung to his blank ceiling with talon like ferocity. 

Mihael glares up at it from his bed, willing it to disappear. He hears his little sister stir in her sleep, and for a moment there is the worry that the dampness may have swallowed her up. It lives in every corner of their home, carefully tucked away in all the hidden crevices. It stares down at them from their ceilings, and sometimes Mihael can see faces in the patterns that glare back at him. He can see teeth like jagged rocks against a gaping black mouth, and the saliva that will drip down onto him while he sleeps if he’s not careful. 

Of course tonight he is not, and he chooses the wrong moment to open his mouth. He tries but fails to choke down the damp lodged in his throat. He sputters and coughs violently while a heaving chest ejects some of the mold from his lungs. It clings to the back of his teeth like a prisoner to the bars of a jail cell. He puts his hand over his mouth and gags as mold filled saliva slips from his mouth and wets the backs of his fingers that are pressed tightly to his lips. His hand presses harder against his mouth, desperately trying not wake his sister in the bed next to him. He gasps as his lungs constrict around the blight and thinks this might have really killed him this time. 

“Hey, you alright?” his brother asks, peeking in through the crack in the doorway. Mihael opens his mouth to answer, but his lungs only fill with more mold when he does so.

“Hey come here, be careful don’t wake Marcie.” Jamie urges him forward with a gentle hand. He carries his heaving brother out of the damp tomb, Mihael is careful not to touch the mildew that inhumes itself to the rotted wood of the doorframe on their way out.

“I’ll getcha outta here don’t worry, just keep breathing okay?” Jamie’s words reverberate in Mihael’s brain. He tries to focus on them, but he can’t make sense of anything he’s saying. He can’t keep track of where Jamie is taking him, or make sense of left from right. The world is fading before him and when he finally succumbs to the heaviness blanketing over him, all he sees is damp blackness. 

“Hey, you awake?” 

“Miha, you alright buddy?” 

“Please wake up.”

Mihael winces against the searing pain in his scalp, his brain throbbing with the gentle endeavour of his brother’s voice. His eyes crack open through the harsh light of the hospital room and he inhales sharply, sending himself into another tormenting coughing fit. Mihael squirms against the bed as a tumultuous assembly of nurses crowd the room.

“Is he okay?” Jamie asks, jumping up from his seat by his younger brother's bed to give them some room. 

“Yes, he’s just getting rid of some of the excess mold in his lungs. The medicine we have administered should clear all of it up in a few days,” one of the nurses says, offering him a warm smile. 

“Thank you,” Jamie mumurs, mustering up a smile that is half that sincerity and scratches the back of his neck, feeling the shame of the situation at hand. 

Jamie, being the oldest, has always felt like it was his duty to protect his siblings. He protected them against the looming threats of CPS, who was always ready with disposed hands lying in wait to tear them away from each other. He protected them from their father, whose animosity was always on a simmer, constantly bubbling just beneath the surface and only needing the smallest things to bring it to a boil. Jamie gave them food, water, and a shelter, he provided the funds to keep them there in that mold ridden house. He gave them everything he could but in the end it still was never enough. That thought plagued Jamie as he lay awake at night, staring vengefully at the mold that would inevitably be what kills them, thinking how it made them no better than any other family in Detroit, they were just another statistic in a hollowed out city.

“You should look into some remediation services. I can give you a number to call if you’d like-” 

“No thank you, I can handle it from here,” Jamie interrupts with sudden authority, ignoring the consternation in the nurse's face. 

“Mr. Ver, verho, verhov-” the nurse stumbles over the pronunciation of his surname, the mouthful of syllables tying his tongue into fumbling knots. Jamie simply rolls his eyes and pronounces it with perfect diction, over enunciating each syllable with a practiced Slovene tongue, “Ver-ho-veck.”

“Right well Mr. Vrhovec, while I admire your dedication, the fact is that this boy is suffering under whatever the conditions of your home are. This doesn’t happen with a small infestation, this is clearly of a much larger scale. It should be dealt with immediately, if not I fear what could happen to him and yourself. It’s really in your family's best interest to call in a professional.”

Jamie sighs, taking off his glasses and dragging a calloused hand down his face that is much too worn for a seventeen year old. His dark eyes are weighted down with sleepless nights, and the loose brown curls on top of his head are always tangled and greasy. The dark color of his hair and eyes is illuminated by the alabaster tone of his skin, the traits a gift from his mother. Everything about Jamie is too hardened and brash from the scruff dotting his sloped jawline to the sharp bridge of his nose. He is strong and assured until you reach his shoulders that are always slumped over as he carries himself with caution and hesitancy, his lack of confidence in himself shows in his stride. If his mother was still here, she would've smacked him upside the head and told him to stand up straight, to act stronger than he feels. /p>

He knows how he looks, and he knows how his family looks to other people on the outside. They are poor and they are scum, living in filth and squalor. Of course their poverty isn't a small infestation, it's a product of something on a larger scale, infecting most places in America.

“I know, we'll fix it soon, we will. I just need some more time.”

“Well Mr.Vrhovec, I fear you might not have much left.” The nurse looks over to Mihael and then back to him. Jamie wishes he could punch the stupid condescending look off the man’s face. 

“Right, like I said, I’m doing all I can. This won’t happen again,” he assures, and the nurse just nods, shifting the clipboard under his arm as he heads for the door. Jamie stuffs his hands in his pockets and sits down next to Michael. Guilt washes over his sullen features as he looks at the boy wheezing in the hospital bed. He takes his hand out of his pocket to run it through his matted hair, reaching out to push Mihael's own wayward curls out of his face. Mihael stirs and opens his eyes, making Jamie sit up abruptly.

“How ya doing buddy?” he asks quietly, trying to mask the sadness he feels with a gentle smile. Mihael breathes one back, wincing against the rattling in his chest.

“Good,” Mihael answers finally. In truth he felt better than he had the night before. All he wants now is to get back to his sister and make sure she’s okay. He doesn’t like it when she’s left alone with their father, he's cruelest when she's around. His hands are especially harsh and his voice is louder than normal. Mihael doesn't trust him to be alone with her.

“Is Ivan home?” Mihael asks, hoping maybe his older brother had made it back sometime after they’d left for the hospital last night. 

“Yeah buddy, don’t worry. I called him over to watch Marcie after I brought you here.” Jamie admires the concern Mihael shows for his younger sister, and some parts of Jamie wished this could be Ivan lying in a hospital bed instead of Miheal.

“Good,” was all he says before he’s drifting back to sleep again.

-

“Did you really almost die?” Marcela asks with stars in her eyes. Her brother is a superhero, he could survive anything. 

“Kinda yeah,” he replies, as he enters their room. He sits down on the bed and waits for the familiar groan of the mattress against the bed frame. He sighs, taking in the despairing sight of his bedroom. He looks to the floor as if keeping his eyes away from the black spots that dance along the walls and ceiling will make them disappear. Marcela winds the loose threads of the sheets around her finger and asks offhandedly, “The damp is gonna kill us, isn’t it Miha?” He is about to answer her when his attention was called to a loud crash in the living room.

“Yeah, if Henrik doesn’t first,” Mihael says through a sigh. He ushers the tiny girl into a crawl space in the wall which was just a hole they’d made with their fists. She curls into herself so she can fit in between the wooden boards and drywall and rests her forehead against her knees, watching the thin rays of light from the room disappear as Mihael pushes some plywood against the opening. She listens as the man opens the door and braces against the few delicate moments of silence that will ultimately determine his mood. 

“Kje je tvój brat?” he asks, as he begins searching the room for signs of life. 

“Not here,” Mihael answers plainly in english, careful not to give anything away, not even his brothers whereabouts. 

“Marcela?” he asks, frowning when Mihael shakes his head, but says nothing. Mihael glances over at the crawlspace and swallows thickly, hoping Henrik won't notice the plywood that had begun to shift slightly from its spot on the wall. Henrik grunts and stares down at the quivering boy beneath him. What is there to make of your own child cowering in fear because of you? To know that you caused this, you made him this way and he is a product of the environment you created, one that molds thoughts of “never good enough” into “never man enough”and makes them synonymous somehow.

The animosity is back and is brought to a boil beneath his skin. Mihael watches it flicker behind his eyes, and perhaps he’d imagined it, but he thinks he can see traces of “I’m sorry” in there too. He knew it was gone when a tremendous thundering hand collides with his cheek. Mihael stands there with burning tears in his eyes, grasping at the burst of flames erupting on his skin with shaking hands. His whole face grows numb as the man above him glowers with disgust. Mihael couldn’t possibly understand the conflict racing through the man's head. He couldn’t ever understand that his father hits him because he sees himself in the boy nd he doesn’t want his son to be weak like him. He doesn’t know that Henrik is grappling at any form of power and authority he can get in order to forget that he too was once this small, frightened little boy, shaking beneath his father's unyielding fists. Henrik doesn’t want his son to always be so desperate to prove himself like he was. He wants Mihael to be strong and assured like Henrik's fists are, so he hits him harder until the tears disappear from his sons eyes and he’s convinced Mihael’s stronger because of it.

-

Marcie is pressing frozen peas to Mihael's cheek with a stained washcloth dripping in a tub of bloodied water beside them. She runs her fingers across his forehead, sweeping the dark curls of hair away from his injuries. She dabs the bag of vegetables against the blue and purple blossoming along his battered cheek bones. His eye swells with his father's phantom touch, and although Marcela’s touch is nothing but of gentle benevolence, he still falters beneath her fingertips as if she might strike him too. 

“He hurt you bad this time, didn’t he?” she asks while quietly minding her task. Bits of drywall fall from her shoulders as she works to clean him up and Mihael studies the dirt stuck in her pores. He reaches his thumb up to swipe it away and she puts down the bag of frozen goods, letting his thumb linger by her own cheek. 

“You don’t always have to take care of me. It’s okay to let me take care of you once in awhile,” she says, and Miheal is in awe. 

She’s such a wise girl for her age. She's only six years old and she’s already healing wounds, soothing split lips and stitching together inch deep lacerations by his temple. She already knows to leave the Tv on for Jamie so he can sleep at night, and is already so keen on when to keep her distance from Henrik and when to get close. Mihael thinks she knows too much, but he’d never tell her that for fear of getting his ass kicked. Marcela's tough like that.

“I know that,” Mihael says through a split lip, and he smiles despite the searing pain it causes him. “But it’s my job to take care of you too.”

He lets his thumb fall and she presses the peas back up to his face. This day was not that different from any of their other ones; their childhoods spent with black and blue rose petals painted across their cheeks, their father shelling out abuse through broken glass bottles spindling into their hearts like daggers. Not only that, but they were constantly ducking away from the damp that was devouring the house from the inside out, removing any sense of individuality and leaving them to become nothing more than another statistic buried below the poverty line.

Within this accumulated mass of nightmares, there were good memories carefully tucked away for when times were hardest. Day dreams of times spent exploring the abandoned hospitals across the pond and pretending they were doctors in a war. Dreams of barefoot summers that were just a few memories away from a fort constructed with the sodden blankets in the living room, ones that shielded them from the thunderstorms outside their windows. These memories were preserved and kept for when they seemed like they never belonged to them in the first place

As they grew older, as the dawn bled into midday on the sea, their bonds slowly faded. They no longer played pretend in abandoned buildings or danced barefoot in forgotten fields. Mihael and Marcela are still fiercely close, although their days of proclaiming their affection outwardly has curbed with time. Jamie is still the head of the household, just as determined to keep the family afloat as ever even when he started his own with his son Nathaniel a few months after Mihael’s visit to the hospital. Their other brother Ivan seemed to fall out of step from the rest as he always had. But they still have each other. They will always have each other.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this, or found it tolerable at the least. I want to dedicate this story to my good friend Sydney who is constantly devoting her time and energy into helping me become a better writer, and helped support me in writing this story as well. She edits my words, gives me feedback and support, and so much more. She is my biggest motivator and personal hype man. Love you to the ends of this Earth my man, my pal, my bud, my dude. Hope you found this story a litle more than tolerable as well.


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